Mickey Hart on Healing Vibes
How Rhythm Repairs Broken Connections
– and Creates New Ones
Grateful Dead drummer and Rex Foundation board member Mickey Hart first made the connection between Christine Stevens and Rex. When we asked him to talk a bit about why he thought it was so important to support drum circles in Iraq, he was happy to oblige.
— Mary Eisenhart
"Rhythm is kind of like a code. It’s a universal.
It’s one thing we all have in common."
Rex Foundation: How did you get involved with this project? What you did you like about it, and why did you think it was a good fit for Rex?
Mickey Hart: Christine called me, and said she was going to Iraq, armed with a drum in hand. (laughs) I knew Rex would just love this — Rex (Jackson), the guy that this was named after, this foundation; his spirit is part of this. Rex would have loved it, and Rex as the organization, it was perfect for it.
Rex Jackson – c 1975
One woman on a mission. What an incredible idea... Hands on, face to face, with strangers, sharing group rhythm.
That was a danger zone for her to go into — my first thought was, a blonde woman going to Iraq with a drum? I thought wow, how bold. But she was on this mission, and instead of promoting gunning people down, she’s promoting peace and harmony, and understanding, love, and playing drums with them, united in a common groove.
Any time you get a grouping of souls together, the experience of heightening of power, raising power, group and personal power — this ritual is good.
Drum circles are an audible version of group rapture, ritual — kind of like what Grateful Dead does. When people get together to understand other cultures, usually the language of music, and certainly of rhythm, is a valuable thing. It’s a great commodity. It becomes medicinal. It fosters communication; connections are made. That’s what this is all about.
Rhythm is kind of like a code. It’s a universal. It’s one thing we all have in common. Melody and harmony, perhaps not, but rhythm is universal.
So this is what Christine was going over there to share with them, to learn from them, and to create facilitators there — indigenous people who picked up on the spirit and understood its innate properties, its medicinal properties, and as a vehicle, a tool for communication. There needs to be more training of facilitators there.
This was all part of her mission. I thought this was a perfect thing, an outreach that the Rex Foundation was made for, because this kind of project would have fallen through the cracks for sure. That’s what Rex was all about, to work under the radar, in the cracks, finding the things that really did need support, that didn’t have great overhead, that staff weren’t eating things up in salaries.
I knew Christine; she had a track record as a great facilitator in drum circle world, as a rhythm therapist, so she was really qualified to share this experience with strangers, representing the Rex Foundation. As I saw it, part of her being there was as a representative of our spirit. So we were there with her, I thought, and I thought, this is really cool.
Mickey Hart
Rex: She talked about drumming as a very powerful peacemaking tool. Does your experience speak to that?
Hart: Of course. It promotes entrainment. Rhythmic entrainment. Humans are rhythm machines. That’s what life is built on, rhythm, so when you share that with someone you make a connection at a very deep level. You get to understand their emotions, their hopes, dreams, fears, whatever.
When you entrain you get in sync, you have common ground, you’re touching the essence of life. You’re sharing some kind of sacred space with these people. That makes peace.
I don’t ever remember coming off of a stage where people were really passionate about playing music at that moment, and feeling bad towards them. It’s always a heightened experience; it’s always enlightening in some way, and it makes you feel good. And it’s fun.
You don’t have to speak the same tongue; you just look in their eyes and you play in unison and you share a groove together, some commonality. That goes a long way to understand a person and their culture and their sensibility. It’s a code. It’s a language.
Christine knows this language, and she was trying to share it, and teach, and learn their customs as well, rhythmically speaking. Whenever you relieve suffering, and bring peace, especially using rhythm, this is my cosmology.
It is definitely a peacemaking tool. It creates good feelings toward each other on a basic level. So of course, it does work.
Science is proving that the brain is different during an auditory driving experience like a drum circle, for instance, so the neurological aspect of all this rhythm-and-the-brain research is appearing. Christine is up on that as well, being a therapist. She knows all these things and she’s out there in the field, shaking a drum and playing and sharing rhythm, so I have ultimate respect for her.
Rex: You’ve worked with her on other projects?
Hart: Yes, I have in the past. I’m on the board of the Institute of Neurologic Function, music and the brain, in New York. Music and the brain, that’s the new frontier, the most exciting thing that is happening in the study of how the vibratory world affects brain wave function. Oliver Sachs is part of that.
Sometimes I conduct drum circles with the motor impaired, Alzheimer’s, dementia (patients). I asked Christine to facilitate one of these sessions with me in a large auditorium with 50 or 75 people in wheelchairs, shaking and drumming and rattling and doing whatever they could, shouting and screaming.
Those are the kinds of things I’ve done in the past with Christine, using rhythm as a tool to reconnect the broken connections you have when you have dementia or you’re motor impaired.
Rex: Some of Christine’s stories about the project’s short-term impact were very dramatic and moving; what’s your experience of the long-term effects, and how you sustain that level?
Hart: You have to practice it. You have to do it. It has to become ritual. It has to be a lifestyle.
It has to become part of your lifestyle. There have to be people that can be trained who train others. You have to build a subculture, a community that believes in this kind of rhythm magic, as it were.
You have to do it as often as you can; you have to practice it, like you have to practice trance, you have to practice your instrument, you have to practice your skill, whatever it is. It’s a tool, and you get better and better at it, the more you do it.
And of course you will want to do it as often as needed. Use it as a medicine. If it’s once a day in a drum circle, or twice a week, or once a week, or every night you’re home, which happens very often in many homes. I know in my home we drum as a family, and it really brings us together in a whole different way.
You have to keep up on it. You can’t just have a visitor come from Out There and then not practice what you have just learned.
Christine will probably go back and keep feeding this fire, now that she knows that one has been lit. What a great handshake — America to these people. Now these are good vibes.
It goes a long way, a good rhythmic experience. Christine is proving it and she’s out there doing it, and this is quite a major thing.
Rex: She says she’s planning to go back in April; are you planning to stay involved?
Hart: Yeah, any time she calls I’ll be there. Any kind of help she needs, if I can be of service, I definitely support Christine’s mission.
Rex: When people hear this interview and read the story, they’ll probably be excited too. What can they do to move this effort along?
Hart: Well, first of all, get on Christine’s trip. Consult her web site and look up, in your own neighborhood, the rhythmic centers, people who are playing in drum circles and so forth and having fun together. It’s a family affair; it’s a wonderful recreation, and it can become a lifestyle. It’s real easy; it’s inexpensive and a lot of fun.
Rex: Anything else?
Hart: It’s all about her, and it’s all about the drums and the power of rhythm to bring people together.
It really works, this is powerful medicine; Christine now knows how to use it. Remember, we’re talking about something that’s invisible. You can’t see a rhythm. You can hear it and feel it. The vibratory world is invisible, so it’s really hard to talk about those kinds of things.
But the results, after experiencing these kinds of rituals and events, are quite noticeable. You’ll get it immediately.
